The Spirit of the Wind
by goetzte
Summary: Korra continues to struggle with the spiritual aspect of her Avatar obligations in the wake of the Equalist attack. Despite the young Avatar's attempt to calm herself, anger comes to her more quickly than inner peace, straining her relationships with Mako, Tenzin, and her own ego. Will the figurehead of the Republic find the composure as spirits begin to steal away her friends?
1. Chapter 1

**Part I**

**Across** the snowy froth of the midland tundra a path cast with hoof prints snaked like a serpent's tail of dripping shadows. The steady intervals of hoof prints wound around the bundles of thickly needled trees, rising from the plush white snow that bound them like the sharp teeth of the land itself. Everywhere the wind blew and instilled the otherwise silent and motionless components of the landscape with life. Branches brushing, snow casting off layers of its hide like a shedding beast, the hoof prints disappearing as if they really were the shadows that they appeared to be.

At the end of the ghostly hoof print trail, a beast slumped onward in the frigid evening, its forelegs tall, lank, colored like bark, its hindlegs thick, furred and trunklike. The creature breathed from a head born high upon its shoulders with long antlers like just another set of branches in those coniferous environs. The breaths it expelled were demons, white and vaporous, and eerily visible. The awkward feet of its uneven legs pounded more prints into the snow that accepted them demurely.

As the beast trotted on, the snow began to bounce. It no longer received the blows of the lumbering creature without response, but burst back. The snow slashed about the legs, rising from the earth, first above the knees, then the back, then a tidal wave of white slush crashing down over the antlers, a prison of snow heaved upon the beast, now trapped in a mound the ground had made. While the snout that still protruded from its frosted burial struggled to inhale the icy air, a human figure traced her own tracks in the murderous snow. From the trees, the figure carried the frozen, white waters in her hands, like hovering votive lanterns, though the darkness hid her form. She looked at the pile of risen earth that entrenched her prey, and thrust the snow from afar, her hands not touching it but moving it still, upon the pulsing snout. And the winds did not fray her movement or her life.

**When** the wind cradled in the mountains rushes down toward the austere metal city, it passes the pillars of processed rock like a finger testing routes in a tiny maze. It curves about the stagnant constructs of the city dwellers, pressing against each storefront and crenulated roof top, moving against all things, though it is itself a force wholly without substance. The striped tarps of fruitstands quiver in the presence of this mountain wind, which makes the stony alleys into riverbeds for its invisible flow. And though ignorant of its dominance, the clothen dolls who walk the windswept streets acknowledge the frigid air as a constant in this season of their collective lives. But even in the season to come it will endure, and when the great buildings fall with the wind as an agent of their destruction, that unseen mover will have won.

The sunrise had chased the darkness from the spaces between the city buildings and ushered that same mountain wind to fill the gaps the sunlight had incised in the matrix of the cityscape. Flowing along the channels of cross-streets, the wind followed caravans of slow-moving through-traffic that halted at the bay, beyond which the wind continued to soar. The waters of the bay pulsed softly and yielded to the passing current, pummeling headlong across the bay, in the middle of which stood a colossal monument to the city's founder, gray and chiseled like some undisciplined titan petrified into stone for his wrongdoings. Beside the monument and nearer to the city's shore, the wind careened toward an island of jagged rocks and leafless trees. Atop the small flat clearing on the island's crest, a pagoda rose like a pristine obelisk, like a tower of ice in the wintry climate. Inside one of the many chambers of the pagoda, a penitent sat in meditation. In her lotus pose she sat erect and unaffected by the wind that crept through the slitted window. The flowing, invisible newcomer swayed the girl's long black hair bound with bands beside her ears and at the back of her scalp. She breathed the chilled air, filled her abdomen with its recently absolved flow. The taste of it in her mouth, the cessation of its movement in her lungs. In a moment she exhaled, her eyes opening to reveal the purely white shine of her pupil-less eyes, fluttering with a power neither fully borrowed nor fully her own.

**After** daybreak on the rocky inland, the meditating girl emerged from the pagoda, her eyes normally dilated in the early light with pupils blue like the loose garbs she walked in. She crossed the courtyard to the temple commons on which the emblem of a curling vortex of air was engraved. The wooden door of the mess hall slid open to the quiet of the dining area on whose straw-woven floors crouched a pile of fire-colored cloth, crowned with a pale head, hairless except for the triangular beard descending into its folds. As the girl stepped in, the silent pile of a man unwound and stood, like hanging linens brought to life by a migratory breeze.

"I see that your meditation ended at its usual early time," he said. The girl paced toward the window opposite the door. "Korra, is there something wrong?"

"With what?"

"With you."

"Yes. Of course. I mean, the spiritual thing. It's frustrating. It's just, I want to go back to blasting targets or anything else besides sitting around all day."

"We've talked about the patience needed for this meditative practice, Korra. The skills will come with time."

"I know. But how much time? I haven't learned anything sitting up there, Tenzin. It's like some spiritual dead zone." The mess hall fell into a silence that lingered until the door slid open again. Five black-clad men entered like passengers from a midnight voyage upon the recently vanquished night.

"Who are they? I thought you said no more intruders." The girl protested.

"They're White Lotus agents. And they're not intruders. They're here to accomplish certain spiritual goals themselves, if you can believe that anyone besides yourself has struggles in such areas. Air Temple Island is not dedicated to your struggle alone."

"Right. But. . . I _am_ the Avatar."

"And the Bridge between Worlds, the physical as well as the spiritual. And with the city as it is now, the spiritual aspect of that relationship is in state of unbalance." Tenzin stroked the wedge of his beard. His eyes shut. "You did feel something up there, didn't you, Korra? A disturbance of some sort, perhaps?"

The girl eyed the guests suspiciously, as if their presence held untold weight in the delivery of her forthcoming words. "No." She sighed. "I think I entered the Avatar state again, like before except. . ."

Tenzin nodded. The men in the black robes floated towards the seatless and matted table in the center of the mess hall. As he caught the young Avatar in his gaze, the stoic teacher noticed in her eyes a fear that seemed so foreign there. She looked back at him, finding in his own eyes a hint of bereavement, such as is caused by the disjunction of old friendships.

"If you need anything, Korra—"

"I'm fine. I just need a break." She broke from his sight, the wooden door unlatched by a burst of lashing air conjured by her distant arm. And all in the room listened for the girl's footsteps as she left them there in silence.


	2. Chapter 2

They sat at a streetside cafe in a primitive enclave of the city where the light strained to reach, a place yet to be paneled by glass and metals. He in a grayscale officer's uniform, hair dark like his eyes, dark like the fabric of his past. She herself seated in the chair against the stoneblock storefront, slumped into herself, hair partly sagging over her colored eyes.

"Why has it been so hard, Korra?" he asked. She sighed. Her eye followed a single, cantankerous cart lurching along the street, cabbages in tow.

"Like I said, Tenzin wants too much of me right now. He knows I can't do the whole meditation thing. He says you have to be at peace for all of that, and I don't know how he could expect that from me—from anyone—after what happened, but especially from me."

"Do you mean with the attack on the city?" He pressed his hands together, their fingers sloping like a submersed mountain rising from the depths.

"Well, maybe. But I meant more with when I lost my bending. What were we going to do if I didn't get my powers back? And now I do have them back, but it's like Tenzin doesn't even care because all he wants me to do is, I don't know, contemplate the nature of birds or something."

He tapped his index fingers knowingly. "Okay." His eyes traced the passing of something skyward, as if he, too, were contemplating the nature of some winged beast. "But that's over now. And if Tenzin needs you to move on . . . I mean, if the Avatar has other duties—"

"Mako! How can you expect me to just move on? Maybe you can run off and join the police force to escape what happened, but I can't. I'm bound to this." She hammered her hand against her chest, her gaze cutting into his smooth, well-shaped face.

"Korra." He leaned closer to her. Her body shook as she began to pant. "I'm sorry. I thought that iwe/i had moved past that. We're different people now. The city might be the same old place, but things change, and you gotta keep going."

She chewed at the food that was not there, the sustenance interred elsewhere. "Do you not feel the same way for me now?" Korra said. Along the cobbled street, the cabbage cart halted in its slow progression, the ragged hauler murmuring.

"What do you mean?"

"Do you love me?" Mako's dark eyes scanned the emptiness before him, searching for a clue in its eroded facades from which to draw his answer.

"I think so." Their breath renewed a moment longer. "But," he began, her eyes locked upon his. "Sometimes, Korra, it seems like a one-way road with you."

"What?" The table shook, a wind from afar pressing in upon them.

"Well, it's, you just. . ."

"It's what? What about me?"

"I mean, right now. Did you ever ask how I was feeling? How I was coping with all of this?" Korra's hair began to dance in the wind, the table rattling, Mako's own officer's coat flapping in the wind.

"Coping! You, coping?" The wind blew harder. From atop the cart, still abating in its westward migration, a cabbage head tumbled to the ground where it exploded in a puddle of molted leaves, as if to reveal the defects ever present in its glaucous form.

Mako stood. "How do you not see it, Korra? You've changed. You're so angry now. I'd think you were some kinda bona fide, fire-bending hot head." She remained seated. Her breathing reverberated in the isolation of that scarcely-trodden alleyway. He saw in the movements of her windblown hair the measurements of ages passing before him, before them all. Then the presumed whistling of a teapot hissed between them.

Before his eyes could catch the spiral of air streaming from inside the cafe, the storefront window burst. The icy shatterings poured over Korra's back as she fell from her chair. Mako darted toward her. Behind him, the wind rushed, another explosion resounding.

She rose as he reached her. In her crouched stance, she gasped, extending her arm to unleash a volley of fire that roared over Mako's shoulder and met its unseen end behind him. Mako turned. The cart was in ruins, its hauler screaming and spinning, the cabbages levitating in a cyclone of wood and vegetable slush, bobbing and swirling like demonic cannonballs. While Mako froze, the maelstrom flung a round of projectiles, met quickly with shots of fire, reducing them to charred remnants. Korra launched herself in front of him, pushing him aside like the coliseum's much-braved gate. More fire summoned from her hands and feet crashed into the storm. A cabbage bound for her torso burned against her quickly raised foot. The hauler made another frantic pass in the cyclone, tossed like a ragdoll along an unguessed vector, colliding with Mako in a jumble of limbs.

The disarmed wind cascaded toward her. Not a second passed before she had inverted her airborne body, landing unscathed on the table. Above her, the large stones of the storefront began to rumble. Air gushed from the shattered street-level window and the newly broken ones above. It exited the cafe building like a rush of blood from that stony corpus. Bricks loosed from their mortar launched outward, fleeing the dying construction of their long-dead masons. Clenching her fists, the Avatar steadied the floating bricks, binding them into a sphere of earthen rubble as the building collapsed top to bottom, a waterfall of liberated masonry. Mako seated himself, his awe undeniable strewn across his face. The air calmed, and Korra set the stony ball upon the street where the cart had been, where it slid into a pile of rubble. From the cafe's bones, all but the rear wall destroyed, the dust-covered proprietor crawled in terror, as the hauler gave a final abject shout. The Avatar stood, chest compressing like a set of bellows. They looked upon her as a savior sent to redeem them, Mako and the frantic men alike.


End file.
